Monday, December 22, 2008

Things to avoid if you want to Increase Online Traffic

When it comes to building your website to increase online traffic, there are numerous strategies and ways to bring more visitors to your site. However, there are some things you should specifically avoid when you’re trying to increase online traffic.

The first is bad navigation. If you use a lot of flash or java navigation, you may find that your site simply won’t work with some versions of some internet browsers. This prevents visitors from using your site’s navigation at all, and they will most likely simply visit another site and never return to yours. Bad navigation can also frustrate people who are visiting your site, sending them running. Finally, if you want to increase online traffic, you want search engines to rank your site high on their list of results. However, search engines can’t read anything that’s encoded in a java or flash menu, so relying to heavily on either can cost you.

Another thing to avoid relying too heavily on is images. Just like flash and java menus, search engines can’t read any text inside an image. By adding alt text to the image, you can somewhat get around this, but still, it’s a good idea to not use images that much. Some websites only use their company name in a big banner-this is very bad and can lead to your site being ranked lower on website searches.

Speaking of search engines, many people do search engine optimization on their site with the hope that it will increase online traffic. However, some people take SEO too far and write their website text only for search engines. When people read the website, the text sounds very unnatural, stiff, and is often uninformative. This turns people off and, while it might get more people to your website, they probably won’t stay very long.
Robert Wigle is a traffic expert. If you want to increase your website traffic
visit his site at: http://www.10DollarTrafficSecret.com

Spamming Will Not Increase Web Site Traffic

There are a couple of different marketing philosophies that are often used online. One is to target a very specific audience to increase web site traffic. The concept is to better focus your marketing so you are promoting your site only to the people who may actually want to visit it. The other takes the opposite approach: it advocates marketing to everyone you possibly can to increase web site traffic. While both have their pros and cons, neither will succeed if you resort to spamming.

What is spamming? Well, there are a couple of different aspects to it. Most people are probably familiar with email spam, or the dozens of unsolicited email that comes to your inbox every day. Email spam doesn’t always advertise stuff-sometimes, it’s spam about a political cause or wanting you to join some group. However, it’s all junk and if you’ve been hit with piles of spam, you know how annoying it can be. One or two emails about your website to people who specifically gave you their email address isn’t that bad, but if you start sending out emails every few days trying to get people to visit your site, you’ll probably find people blocking your email addresses.

Message board spam is just as bad, and it won’t help you increase web site traffic. You don’t want to upset people on message boards because doing so will get you banned from that board. If there’s a place to post web site links, only post your link there. If there isn’t, you may not be allowed to link to your site at all unless it’s in some way relevant to a discussion. You can, however, include your web site link in your signature, which is a good place to put it.

While the urge to spam can be great, and while it may seem like it should increase web site traffic, studies have shown that it really doesn’t. Keep this in mind next time you want to start posting your web site link everywhere you can find.
Robert Wigle is a traffic expert. If you want to increase your website traffic
visit his site at: http://www.10DollarTrafficSecret.com